ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS a cuckold's surrender, since she remained faIthful to her French-colonial past." French tradition in St. Lucia was never to be totally suppressed by the es- tablishment of English culture. It sur- vives most obviously in religion: ninety per cent of the island's population is Ro- man Catholic. Many towns and villages retain their old names-Pointe du Cap, Choiseul, Micoud, Soufrière, Laborie, Vieux Fort. The French tongue lives on in an underground of patois, fed by St. Lucia's contacts with Martinique, just twenty-five miles to the north. English, in standard and dialect forms, is the reigning language, and even those forms are modulated by the melody and ca- dence of French Creole. Small though St. Lucia may be, it is one of the larger islands in the Wind- ward group. It is mountainous, with lush foliage, and is two hundred and thirty- eight square miles in area. Its popula- tion, of approximately a hundred and fifty thousand, is predominantly black and mulatto. Fishing, charcoal-making, and farming (coconuts, bananas, sugar- cane) were its main sources of income until the relatively recent development of a tourist industry. Perhaps because of the smallness of St. Lucia and the poverty of its resources, Walcott tended to say in later years that he sprang from "a colo- nial backwater." Backwater or not, it has the distinction of having produced two Nobel Prize winners in the past thirteen years: Sir Arthur Lewis, in Economics, in 1979, and now Walcott. From their sources in St. Lucian life, the concerns that became the focus of Walcott's writing extended gradually to include much of the English-speaking CarIbbean. And part of what that writ- ing mirrors is the multi-ethnic character of West Indian culture-a culture of people descended from aboriginal Caribs and from Africans, Chinese, East Indi- ans, Europeans, Lebanese, Syrians, and the products of intermarriage, all living together in reasonable, if not perfect, harmony. Walcott is of mixed Mrican and European extraction: his grand- mothers were descended from slaves, his grandfathers were English and Dutch. It has been a special effort of his to remain conscious of the union within him of the two racial and social strains, acknowl- edging himself very early to be "a divided child." The character Shabine, in Walcott's poem "The Schooner Flight," is plainly the poet himself: "I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, / . . . I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." W ALCOTT'S career may be said to have been launched in fire. At eighteen, he wrote a sonnet about a fire that, on a Saturday night in June of 1948, burned most of Castries to the ground: After that hot gospeller had levelled all but the churched sky, I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire; Under a candle's eye that smoked in tears, I Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire. All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales, Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar. . . . To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails, Blessing the death and the baptism by fire. The Castries fire had a liberatIng effect on Walcott's social imagination. It pleased him to think that the conflagra- tion had burned down almost all the houses of social and cultural power-un- til he saw that, miraculously, the Roman Catholic church was still standing, unsinged. It was what the "hot gospeller" had spared, against "the churched sky." Above the vacant horizon, it looked down with invincible authority upon the charred and (from the ecclesiastical per- spective) partly sinfiù remains of the city. Most places of privilege were gone, leav- ing, according to an essay of Walcott's, "blackened walls, ridiculous arches of doorways," and "steps that marched in air." The catastrophe, he wrote in a memoir, had "humiliated the smug, re- petitive lives of those civil servants, mer- chants, and Creole professional men who had lived in rambling wooden houses with verandahs and mansards, at- tics for mongoloids, alcoholic uncles, and half-racked aging aunts." A good deal of the "rigidly constructed French- colonial life" had vanished in smoke. But there remained, of course, the edifice of severe Catholic morality-as it was seen by Walcott, who belonged to the tiny Methodist minority of Castries. 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